Tuesday, April 25, 2017

IdN v23n6: Illustration in Pattern Making — The Perpetual Promise of a Repeat Performance

The Perpetual Promise of a Repeat Performance

Pattern is one of the most under-rated — and therefore often unfairly disregarded — genres of design. All you have to do, surely, is come up with a few elements that in terms of colour, shape, form and size combine well together, and then repeat them ad infinitum, no? This is a common misapprehension of the uninitiated. The truth is that pattern-creation can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make it. And it is something that almost every designer has had recourse to during their career.

So all the rules that apply to design in general are relevant to the act of creating a memorable pattern; none more so than that it should tell some sort of a story… and answer the client’s brief — to sell a product, market a brand, advertise an event, whatever — as succinctly and impactfully as possible. As always, simplicity is the hardest goal to achieve. What could be a more basic pattern-design concept that the monogram? Yet a truly successful one can take hours, days, weeks and months even, to come up with.